Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

“I didn’t mean anything,” he said.

“No, it’s okay,” she told him. “This happens all the time. And it’s only going to get worse.”

“Why?” he asked. I didn’t know the answer either.

“Because she’s about to become a movie star. Her movie comes out in a couple of weeks, and then everyone in New York is going to want her.”

He was impressed and tried to ask us more questions, but I was busy trying and failing to read Sophie’s face. On the way home I wanted to ask her what she meant by “wife,” but she was quiet on the subway, gripping my hand and staring straight ahead, so I didn’t bring it up.

. . .

ON THE NIGHT OF THE PREMIERE, I wore a dark blue dress Sophie had bought me, cut low and tight in the bust and flowy around my hips and thighs. People who knew Sophie kept telling me how beautiful I looked and then asking her where she’d been and if she was going to whatever other event or party or screening they wanted to show off their invites to. I knew she could work a crowd if she tried, but today she just mumbled some excuses about being really busy and sat down in the back with me, clutching my hand.

I hadn’t been in the editing room, so the way the movie looked was a shock to me. In Marianne Sophie always made us wait for the most beautiful light, even for the saddest scenes, so the whole movie looked golden. The few reviews we got all mentioned that. But Isabella opened at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, on a cloudy day with a yellow-gray sky. I didn’t remember shooting the scene — Sophie must have gone without me. The opening credits rolled over the gray water and the empty boats; once a seagull flew across the frame. I thought maybe the shot was supposed to be sad in a poetic way, but instead it looked flat, like Sophie’s face when you couldn’t tell what she was thinking. I started to worry that I was already missing the point of the movie. Then the scene changed and there I was, in the bottle factory in my Isabella dress.

At first I was vain and nervous and I stared at myself on the screen to see if I looked fat. But then I forgot to look at my chin, my waist, the neckline of the dress where the flesh of my breasts came up, and instead it was like when I was little and I would wake up early in the morning to hear my mom crying. She could never sleep then, after my dad went away for the last time and before she met my stepdad, and she’d be up sobbing at four a.m. and banging mugs and bowls around in the kitchen, I think hoping I or my sister would wake up and go make her feel better. I tried it once, but it didn’t work — she just cried harder and talked about being a bad mom — and so after that when I couldn’t go back to sleep I’d just lie in bed and pretend to be someone else.

Sometimes it was Charlotte, a tall, pretty girl in my grade whose parents already had a college fund for her. Sometimes it was Tom Winston, Mom’s second cousin who moved to Richmond and bought a car dealership and came back every year for the Fourth of July with a fat watch and pictures of his wife and daughters, all blond and perfect-looking, like they’d never in their lives stayed up all night crying. But it wasn’t just people who had it good that I thought about. Sometimes I’d pretend to be the old man with no teeth who sold peanuts at the bus stop in town, while all the high school boys kicked dust on him and made fun of his baby gums. Or I’d be Melissa Osburn, who lost her leg all the way up to the hip when drunk Brandon Phelps ran her over, and now her mom wouldn’t even let her go to school anymore because something else might happen. The point was just to leave myself and run away into somebody else’s life, and I got really good at it — so good that I carried the other person with me long after it was time to get up, through breakfast and waiting for the bus and the first sludgy hours of school, and when I passed by a mirror I’d be surprised to see my own face looking back.

That was how I felt all during the movie, and when the lights came up I was still sitting straight and queenly, holding my hands in my lap like they were covered with heavy rings. So I was surprised when people started coming up to me, trying to shake my hand. A woman in thick makeup said, “I want you to know I cried when you told Henry he couldn’t push you around anymore. I thought of all the times I wanted to do that and couldn’t, and I just bawled.”

I looked more closely at her — her eyeliner was all smeared and feathered, her eyes red.

A man asked, “Why haven’t we seen you onstage?” And before I could tell him he could have, he shoved a business card into my hand and closed my fingers over it.

Another man, tall and thin and old, told me, “You shone out of that movie, just shone out of it.”

I thought that was a strange thing to say, and then I saw that Sophie was already heading for the exit, all by herself, and nobody was trying to talk to her.

In the lobby people kept stopping me, and I knew I should just push past them to get to Sophie, but it was hard when they kept saying everything I’d hoped someone would say. I started to feel like I’d won a big race, a marathon. I wanted to put my hands in the air. When I reached the glass doors of the theater I could see Sophie — she was sitting on a bench, far away from everyone, with her blank face on. I was going to run and join her when a woman tapped me on the shoulder. She was less dressed up than everyone else, jeans and a blazer, and she looked calm and a little bored and immediately I wanted to please her.

“I’m Lucy,” she said. “I write for Conversation . I’d love to talk to you more sometime.”

I felt like kissing her. Instead I said, “How about tomorrow?”

She smiled like she was surprised, and I realized I should’ve tried to act busy.

“How about Wednesday lunch?” she asked.

I thought of pretending I had something to do then, to seem important, but I couldn’t make myself do it.

“Great,” I said, and she gave me her business card, which I put in the special tiny pocket of my purse so I’d never lose it.

By the time I got outside, Sophie was gone.

I called her phone, and when she didn’t answer I ran all around the theater and side streets, calling her name.

Some older ladies in nice clothes were chatting by the side entrance; I charged at them breathless and panicked, and asked if they’d seen her.

“Well, yes,” said the tallest one, with a big ugly opal necklace in her cleavage. “We saw her in the theater.”

“No,” I said, “I mean after that. Just now.”

They edged away from me. They looked the way strangers sometimes do when you’re really freaking them out, like you might infect them with something.

“We haven’t seen her,” said the woman with the necklace.

As I ran off she called, “You were very good.”

Finally I had to give up. On the train I felt guilty because I’d just been lapping up compliments instead of taking care of Sophie, but also I was angry, because couldn’t she just let me feel important for a little while? By the time I got back to the motel, I had at least ten apologies and as many accusations all written out in my head.

Sophie was sitting on our unmade bed, with her computer open.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “Where have you been?”

She showed me the screen. It was full of listings for apartments.

“I think we should find a real place to live together,” she said.

I was still mad at her for scaring me.

“Now you want to?” I asked. “I’ve been trying and trying to get you to move out of this shithole for months.”

She looked at me with the same face she’d worn when she decided to make the movie modern — big-eyed and hopeful — but too much somehow, I could see now. Kind of desperate.